Gaming
Gaming
Meet the First eSports Entrepreneur
If there’s a face of professional eSports, it’s the charismatic Sean “Day[9]” Plott.
![A photo os Sean 'Day[9]' Plott commentating at a Red Bull eSports event.](https://img.redbull.com/images/c_fill,g_auto,w_100,h_67/q_auto:low,f_auto/redbullcom/2013/11/24/1331621706074_2/sean-day-9-plott-commentates-on-esport-events "Sean 'Day[9]' Plott commentates on eSport events")
Sean 'Day[9]' Plott commentates on eSport events
© [unknown]
The Californian former pro-gamer turned StarCraft 2 commentator hosts competitive gaming events all over the globe, and has racked up more than 59 millions views for his Day[9] Daily show on YouTube - think Match Of The Day for strategy games and you’re not far off.
Two weeks ago, he hosted Red Bull LAN in Seattle, where eight of the world’s best StarCraft 2 players duked it out in front of a live audience. Here he tells us what it’s like carving out a career in an industry that until recently didn’t even exist.
My brother [Pro-gamer and South Korean eSports commentator Nick “Tasteless” Plott] and I grew up talking about games. My mum said no video games until 3pm - but we’d be done with the chores by 10 or 11 so we would talk about video games for five hours.
I was very, very quiet in high school. I really didn’t talk very much, but the instant my brother was able to talk he was able to be funny. I worked on it by literally memorising stand up comedy routines, and trying to memorise the exact intonation, so in a sense a lot of my humour is just good memory.
Sean Plott at Red Bull Battle Grounds.
© [unknown]
My first episode of the Day [9] Daily had 57 viewers. Within a couple of weeks I was getting a few hundred viewers. And then it grew to a few thousand a night. When I did my one hundredth episode [of the Day[9] Daily], where I talked about my life and StarCraft, what it’s meant to me, that got spread real far and wide, because it wasn’t just about StarCraft, it was about what gaming meant to a person. That resonated with a lot of people: to date it’s my most viewed video by an outrageous margin.
When StarCraft 2 came out we decided wanted to do a live launch party and have this huge epic event. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. When that happened it was this incredibly stressful experience, but after that it was like, wait a minute - we can now say that we do event planning, even though we’re total newbies and nearly killed ourselves in the process.
My underlying life goal is to spread as much of the love of esports as humanly possible. We created the After Hours Gaming League as a for fun league for corporations, to have people experience just how fun it is to play video games competitively. We created a league where we got a whole bunch of top tech companies to join in - Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Zynga, Twitter, Dropbox and Yelp. The whole purpose of it was to show gaming is just really damn fun.
There’s no established industry structure and readily available jobs. It’s not like if I wanted to go into football in some way where there are programmes in schools. None of that exists. You really have to be an entrepreneur to figure out how to get ahead. You have to redefine how everything’s functioning.
Mike Lamond and Sean Plott the Starcraft 2 masters
© [unknown]
I’m pretty much the same person off camera as I am on camera. I don’t try to talk up or down, I try to talk at people. I am very, very positive and perky and I believe very strongly in the power of being a positive person - and I work ridiculously hard. I play the game [StarCraft 2] a lot, I devote hours to prep for the show, two to three at a minimum...and what you see is the collective effort of 500 episodes of persistent dedication.
I get recognised in weird places now. I went home to visit my mum for a few days, and the cafe waiter was like “Oh my god, are you Day[9]?”. And then as we were walking out another person was like “Hey, are you Day[9]?”. Then we went to a movie and guy said “I really like your show”. It was cool because my mum was there for all three of them.
To get into this you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to think how can I generate value and as a result generate money from it? The right way to think of it is if I put on a tournament and if I can get a sponsor to give me money then I can do the casting and build a name for myself. From an esports perspective you have created something of value that the community would like. I think of that as the really rewarding part.
